The design and test of modern electronic devices, such as embedded processors (EP) and systems-on-a-chip (SoC) is a complex process involving many stages. For example, many systems, such as mobile devices, networking products, and modems require new embedded processors (EP). These EPs can either be general purpose, such as microcontrollers and digital signal processors (DSP), or application specific, using application specific instruction-set processors (ASIP). Compared to general-purpose processors, ASIPs provide a tradeoff of computational performance and flexibility on the one hand and power consumption on the other. Therefore, ASIPs that are designed to execute specific tasks very efficiently can be found in a wide range of embedded systems.
ASIPs are replacing off-the-shelf processors because of the strong trend towards application-specific, single chip solutions in the embedded systems. Thus, the challenging task for SoC/ASIP design is to explore the architecture space efficiently and fast enough to find the best fit for a given application within a number of constraints, such as performance, power consumption, physical size, market window, etc.
However, designing systems with ASIPs is far more complex than assembling systems with standard processors. The conventional design of embedded processors and the software development tool-chain are done manually with very little automation. This long, labor-intensive process requires teams of highly skilled hardware and software engineers with specialized knowledge.
At one stage of the design process, documentation is generated that describes the processor. Professional processor developers or software programmers understand how critical and important the documentation is to the success of design projects. Good documentation saves a great amount of time for the developers, who are the most expensive resources. However, writing the documentation and its maintenance in large software projects usually take much time and many efforts in collaboration among different teams. Documentation is mostly started very late in the design process, since at this time nearly all the critical parts are in their final phase.
However, producing documentation at the late stages does not serve any purpose for processor design projects, especially for one of the most important documents in the process of designing a processor, the instruction-set manual. The designer's document is used during the design cycle of the processor with the main purpose of keeping the design team up-to-date. The current status of the processor design is reflected and it is important to keep the document up-to-date and quickly distributed.
In the conventional art, the documentation was created manually. However manual writing is lengthy, introduces errors and delays in the design process. Normally, processor cores are designed by a team of professionals. If one or more developers are working on documentation, which manually is a slow process, the whole design team makes slow progress, since any changes must be written down for later modifications to the documentation. This does not promote short time-to-market design projects.
Moreover, the instruction-set is dynamically generated. As such, the manual maintenance of the documentation is very difficult to achieve. In the early stage when the instruction-set is being designed, instructions are constantly being added, removed or modified, and test runs are performed to examine those effects. It is necessary and essential that a correct documentation of the present status of the instruction-set design is available to all the design teams. However, manual maintenance of the documentation slows down the design process, thereby inhibiting short time-to-market design projects.
As a result, it is highly desirable that the document generation parallel the design process in order to benefit the design team in a timely fashion.